Heavy lifting required in predigital world

Ever since I first came across it, probably in the third grade, I’ve had trouble spelling the word parallel.

Even when I get it spelled correctly, it looks wrong to me.

So over the years I’ve looked up parallel dozens of times. Dictionaries have convinced me the word needs three l’s, but they always seem to be in the wrong place.

The other day I was trying to put together a sentence with parallel in it, and I pulled out my old American Heritage to check the spelling, one more time.

And my partner caught me. She said I don’t need a dictionary any longer, that all I have to do is type a word into Google and its spelling and definition will pop right up.

I knew this already. It’s one of the few things about computers that I know, for sure. I’ve looked up the word parallel on this computer a lot of times, and it doesn’t look any better on the screen than it does on a printed page.

But another reason I got this dictionary out, I was feeling the need to do something that has nothing whatever to do with a computer.

Sometimes I feel surrounded by computers, captured by them. They influence just about everything in my life. From where I sit, it’s not easy to reach out and touch a thing that hasn’t been digitalized in one way or another.

My telephone. The morning paper. My blood pressure monitor. My family pictures. My coffee mug and the coffee that’s left in it. My magazines. The clock on the wall that I look at dozens of times every day. The very shirt on my back.

I can, however, reach for a few books that were manufactured before computers invaded my life. My American Heritage Dictionary, for example. I feel a strong attachment to it because this old sweetheart has been with me almost 30 years. Its binding is repaired with two or three kinds of tape.

Just now I looked in the g’s, to see if the word Google is listed. It is not, since Google wasn’t born when this dictionary was published. But I thought maybe the word might be there as the once-famous name of a cartoon character — Barney Google.

The entry closest to Google is the word googol, which means the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. That’s where the name of the search engine came from. I learned that by asking Google.

This is a second-edition American Heritage. I also owned a first edition, which I wore out. Even duct tape wouldn’t hold it together during its latter years.

I bought that first edition when both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were 14 years old. When that pair was born, in 1955, I was using a Webster’s, and here in my home office I still have a big Webster’s Third New International which, if I lift it, hurts my back.

For a dictionary that I could carry around, I switched to American Heritage and I now forget why. Maybe because it has what it calls usage notes, in which experts give their opinion on what constitutes acceptable English.

Also American Heritage has lots of pictures. In the g’s of the old second edition, searching for the word Google? On just one page I get pictures of a goose, a gopher, a gorilla and a Gorgon, which in Greek mythology is an ugly woman with snakes for hair.

I know, I can find stuff like that on this computer. At least I can if a thunderstorm hasn’t knocked out the electricity, or if some condemned hacker hasn’t sent me a virus.

When it’s working right, a computer is a miraculous machine but to an old codger like me, it’s also a little intimidating and here’s why:

Back when I was traveling and writing this stuff daily on a manual typewriter, in cheap motel rooms and under shade trees in roadside parks, I carried a small reference library in my vehicle.

It included a dictionary (for checking the spelling of my old friend, parallel), a Texas Almanac, a World Almanac, a Spanish dictionary and Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms. Plus all six volumes of the Handbook of Texas, which alone weighed a total of 36 pounds. I know because I once weighed them.

To carry all those books, I had a sturdy WWII ammunition box that rode in the back of the station wagon I was driving then. When loaded, that box was too heavy for me to lift.

Today, all the information in those volumes would ride inside a small laptop computer that a 10-year-old girl could lift with one hand.